Tuesday, August 29, 2017

9 reasons you should give away your IP in books

At View we have produced over 1.5 million words of published technical content via a series of over 20 books.

Indeed we have ‘written the book’ (and in some cases more than one book) in each of our core areas of specialisation – estate planning, trusts, tax, smsfs, asset protection and estate administration.

There is a nominal price point to access the intellectual property (IP) in our books; indeed often we give interested advisers copies for free.

Why do we do this and why do we encourage all advisers who are interested in our approach to do the same with their IP?

The key reasons, in no particular order, are as follows –

ZMOT (being the Google theory of ‘zero moment of truth’ before a buying decision is made) says that generally there must be 7 hours of free content, on 11 separate occasions, across 4 medias before a buying decision is made.

Books are the best way we know of to achieve the ‘7/11/4 rule’ and allow easy leverage into multiple channels (as one example, at last count, we had over 30 iterations sourced from our book content with podcasts, seminars, white papers, webinars, apps, online university level courses etc).

It has been argued that every CEO or business owner should have published at least one book.

Yes it is possible to achieve leverage without a book, however for most it would be like (for example) trying to succeed in the music industry without releasing recordings.

LinkedIn Influencer Ron Baker says ensuring he gives away all his intellectual capital each year forces him to replenish and this keeps him relevant – publishing a book helps achieve this aim.

There is a positioning with handing over a book that can not be easily replicated – it is a business card that is not easily thrown away.

The discipline, habits and learnings created by writing a book can not be underestimated – they have a huge impact on all aspects of your business and indeed life.

As has been observed widely – there is no greater ‘ROI’ than a good book. Books change lives and rarely cost more than $100. What other platform delivers this much value for such a nominal investment.

Books demonstrate that the author knows that information in the age of Google can, and indeed must and inevitably will be, free. Knowledge workers understand that the wisdom of understanding information is what is valuable. They also know that the insights of a wise and knowledgeable adviser are even more valuable.